How an icon stands in for the person it shows
I’ve been puzzling over icons. I don’t doubt the value of these beautiful and holy images. They have a place in the most ancient and constant liturgical practices of Christianity.
It’s the theory that is difficult. A good start is a prayer in the Orthodox liturgy for the first Sunday of Lent, addressed to the Virgin Mary: “The indefinable Word of the Father made himself definable, having taken flesh of thee, O Mother of God, and having refashioned the soiled image to its former state, has suffused it with divine beauty.”
In other words, the icon or image or Jesus is valid because God became man as Jesus, himself the icon of God. Veneration of icons was affirmed by the seventh ecumenical council, the second Council of Nicaea, in 787. The first Sunday of Lent celebrates this affirmation as the Triumph of Orthodoxy (against the iconoclasts).
Icons depict things to do with the history of salvation: Jesus and his saints and angels. Scripture and icons are seen as complementary expositions of divine revelation. That is why icons are not meant to be innovative, but must follow established traditions.
In the classic text The Meaning of Icons by Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, published in 1952 and revised in 1983, the status of icons is related to the part played in the Incarnation by the Virgin Mary. She is called the Mother of God or Theotokos (God Bearer) because a mother is mother of a person, and the person who is Mary’s son is Jesus, truly God and man. She is not the mother of his human nature alone, but of the person.
That is a good beginning, but I find difficulty in the next step. This is that the icon is a picture of a person, and thus (in a parallel way to the Mother of Jesus being Mother of God) it is a picture of God. I suppose the correlative formula is true: God is depicted in an icon as man. That is parallel to the true statement: God is born in Bethlehem as man.
It is because an icon can depict the person of Jesus that it may be venerated and kissed. The worship shown to the icon is referred to the original of the image, to the person it depicts, who is God.
The icon bears the same name as the original. “It is Jesus,” is the answer to the question as to who the picture is. We are used to the name of Jesus Christ being written on either side of the figure, with the initial and final letters of Iesous Christos (using the lunate form of sigma): IC XC.
But what is it that we can see that is divine in an icon, something, as it were, of God? Ouspensky suggests we see the glory of God; and that must be true, for the world shows off the glory of God. That seems not to distinguish an icon from any representational picture.
Ouspensky does not deny that icons use convention. On the clothing of Christ (shown teaching in the Temple or descending into hell to raise Adam), golden rays, painted with assiste gilding, signify divine light. Or Christ in majesty is depicted within a mandorla, an almond-shaped aureole.
Icons of saints may be venerated like the holy ones in heaven they represent. Ouspensky points out that the 15th-century icon of St Paul by (Saint) Andre Rublev follows the appearance of the Apostle found on a medal cast in the second or third century. Perhaps St Paul did look like that, but surely the essential thing is that this traditional depiction labels the image as him: the saint to whom honour is given.
As for angels, their depiction must be entirely conventional. Though part of the Church in heaven, they do not share in the bodily life of human beings and of the Incarnate Christ.